Freek.dev

In the beginning of the year people tend to compile lists with everything they want to achieve in the next 365 days. But sometimes, instead of wanting to learn or start something new, it's also good to leave an old thing behind.

A little over 2 years ago I started a weekly newsletter for Linux & open source users, called cron.weekly. Today, I'm sending the last issue in what is probably going to be a pretty long time. I need a break.

Here's why.

tl;dr: I've got a wife, 2 kids, a (more than) full time job, 2 other side projects and a Netflix subscription. For now, cron.weekly doesn't fit in that list anymore.

https://ma.ttias.be/im-taking-break-cron-weekly/

There's really no shame in calling it quits on some things to make place for fresh activities. The last couple of months I've seen some people close to me stop doing things they were once passionate about, but didn't fully enjoy anymore. And in each case it turned out for the better.

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Together with Mattias I've been working on Oh Dear! for the last couple months. We launched it last week. If you want to try it out, just register and you'll get a trial period of 10 days. No credit card is needed.

I plan on writing a few technical posts on the whole project in the next couple of months. Right now you can already read this excellent article written by Paul Redmond about what Oh Dear! can do for you.

What differentiates Oh Dear from other uptime monitoring solutions, in my opinion, is the mixed content detection and SSL certificate monitoring. The web is moving to HTTPS, and your site’s availability can be affected by modern browsers when things go awry with your certificate.

https://laravel-news.com/oh-dear-app

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Cristopher Rumpel recently launched a big redesign of his blog. In a new post he touches on why he moved away from his old solution, and what kind of problems he had to solved. Great read!

One of my resolutions for 2017 was to redesign my blog. One week before the new year I faced myself with the challenge and thought to myself if this was still doable. Somehow I managed it and here it is. In this article I will explain the process and show you how I redesigned the blog with Tailwind CSS and moved it from Jekyll to Laravel with keeping almost the same performance.

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/01/how-i-redesigned-my-blog-and-moved-it-from-jekyll-to-laravel

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There's some cool stuff in the new version of the Vue devtools. Guillame Chau, member of the Vue core team, made a nice overview of the improvements.

A big update was released to the Vue devtools just a few days ago. Let’s dive into the new features and improvements!

https://medium.com/the-vue-point/whats-new-in-vue-devtools-4-0-9361e75e05d0

The are more cool features on the way as well:

We also have a few things in the works, like a standalone Vue devtools app that will allow debugging any environment (not just Chrome and Firefox), a brand new Routing tab and an improved support for Set and Map types.

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On his blog, Sebastian De Deyne, shares a quick tip on how to pass data to a layout in Laravel.

Laravel quick tip! The @extends Blade directive accepts a second (undocumented) parameter to pass data to the parent layout.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/passing-data-to-layouts-in-blade-through-extends

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Collin O' Dell, member of the PHP League, shares how he was able to significantly improve the performance his json5 package using Blackfire profiling.

Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.

...

I always knew that a PHP-based implementation would be slower than PHP's native C implementation, but execution time measured in minutes was completely unacceptable!

So I fired up Blackfire (which I've previously used to optimize league/commonmark) and got to work.

https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201801/optimizing-colinodelljson5-blackfire

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Quick @laravelphp tip:
Use the "wasRecentlyCreated" model attribute to check if your model was created or found ???? pic.twitter.com/HZwdDyqAw4

— Marcel Pociot (@marcelpociot) January 6, 2018

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Marcel Pociot, creator of the BotMan framework, explains how you can leverage Alexa, BotMan and Laravel Forge to deploy sites with your voice.

http://marcelpociot.de/blog/deploy-your-laravel-forge-sites-with-your-voice

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In an article at Hackernoon, David Gilbertson warns about the dangers of trusting 3rd party packages on npm. He goes into how a package can make unwanted http requests in the browser and how you can protect yourself against that.

It’s been a frantic week of security scares — it seems like every day there’s a new vulnerability. It’s been a real struggle for me personally to pretend like I understand what’s going on when asked about it by family members.

Seeing people close to me get all flustered at the prospect of being “powned” has really put things in perspective for me.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I’ve decided to come clean and tell you all how I’ve been stealing usernames, passwords and credit card numbers from your sites for the past few years.

https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5

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Martin Hujer shares some pretty good tips for working with Composer.

Although most PHP developers know how to use Composer, not all of them are using it efficiently or in a best possible way. So I decided to summarize things which are important for my everyday workflow.

The philosophy of most of the tips is "Play it safe", which means that if there are more ways how to handle something, I would use the approach which is least error-prone.

https://blog.martinhujer.cz/17-tips-for-using-composer-efficiently/

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Basecamp recently open source Stimulus, their new JS framework. It aims to make sprinkling some JavaScript on your page here an there very easy.

Stimulus is a JavaScript framework with modest ambitions. It doesn't seek to take over your entire front-end—in fact, it's not concerned with rendering HTML at all. Instead, it's designed to augment your HTML with just enough behavior to make it shine. Stimulus pairs beautifully with Turbolinks to provide a complete solution for fast, compelling applications with a minimal amount of effort.

https://github.com/stimulusjs/stimulus

DHH talks a bit on why and how they created it in this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast.

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In a post on vuejsdevelopers.com Anthony Gore explains how to get started with serverside rending with Laravel and Vue. Cool stuff!

Server-side rendering is great way to increase the perception of loading speed in your full-stack app. Users get a complete page with visible content when they load your site, as opposed to an empty page that doesn’t get populated until JavaScript runs.

One of the downsides of using Laravel as a backend for Vue.js was the inability to server render your code. Was. The release of Vue.js 2.5.0 has brought server-side rendering support to non-Node.js environments including PHP, Python, Ruby etc.

In this tutorial, I’ll take you through the set up steps for Laravel and demonstrate a simple server-rendered app. Get the code for this here on Github.

https://vuejsdevelopers.com/2017/11/06/vue-js-laravel-server-side-rendering/

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My colleague Brent is currently creating a new package called spatie/async. This one will let you easily do some asynchronous parallel processing in PHP. In a new post on his blog Brent explains why we are creating the package and compares it to a few other solutions out there.

If you're into parallel PHP, you probably heard of Amp and ReactPHP. Our package aims not to compete with those two, as it only solves one tiny aspect of parallelism in PHP. We did however use both the packages to run some benchmarks against. Let's take a look at the results.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/asynchronous-php

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Dayle Rees, author of various popular books on PHP and Laravel, has recently blown new life into his efforts of creating IDE and terminal themes. He created themes for most of the popular apps out there including: PhpStorm, VS Code, Atom, iTerm2, ...

You can preview all the themes on: https://rainglow.io/

I've been using Dayle's Material Peacock for quite some time. Currently I'm digging white based themes and I'm on the GitHub theme.

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???? Sometimes you want quick on-the-fly authorization, without the hassle of registering a policy/callback at the Gate.

Laravel's HandlesAuthorization trait is perfect for this. Simply call the `deny()` method, and Laravel will respond with a 403 HTTP response ???? pic.twitter.com/O36agH2o3u

— Joseph Silber (@joseph_silber) December 28, 2017

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Kaelan Cooter, software engineer at LogRocket, wrote a good post on the state of JavaScript and it's ecosystem in 2017. I'm very curious to see how WebAssembly will mature in the next year. There seems to be a lot of potential there.

A lot has happened in 2017, and it can be a bit overwhelming to think about. We all like to joke about how quickly things change in frontend engineering, and for the last few years that has probably been true.

At this risk of sounding cliché, I’m here to tell you that this time it’s different.

Frontend trends are starting to stabilize — popular libraries have largely gotten more popular instead of being disrupted by competitors — and web development is starting to look pretty awesome.

In this post, I’ll summarize some of the important things that happened this year in the frontend ecosystem with an eye toward big-picture trends.

https://blog.logrocket.com/frontend-in-2017-the-important-parts-4548d085977f

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Beautiful, organized results in PHPUnit, where have you been all my life?
Composer-install this bad boy, add one line to phpunit.xml, and enjoy the view. ????https://t.co/JJi4tEhWWo pic.twitter.com/4pndct3iZk

— Keith Damiani (@keithdamiani) December 21, 2017

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